Maari Ma Aboriginal Health Services and Mount Sinai College

Exchange was able to connect Mount Sinai College with Dr Garth Alperstein who is a semi-retired community paediatrician and has been working very part-time at the Maari Ma Aboriginal Health Service in Broken Hill for about the past 7 years as a Child and Youth Health Advisor.

Garth would like to thank Mount Sinai College so much for their generosity in donating some of their iPads for the project at Maari Ma Aboriginal Health Service. The health service established a specific Youth Health Clinic around November 2015. Many adolescents’ health problems are psychosocial in origin, resulting in mental health, lifestyle and behavioural problems, and risk taking behaviours. To identify these issues early, psychosocial assessment tools have been developed and are quite widely used by health professionals. The Canadians developed an interactive electronic version for use on a tablet/iPad which Maari Ma has modified for the Aboriginal youth population in Broken Hill, and recently introduced into the health service. Instead of being questioned by a doctor or nurse, using the usual tap and slide functions of the ipad, the young person fills in the information in private, which then gets sent immediately electronically to the nurse and/or doctor they will be seeing, neatly summarised. Experience from Canada and Australia is that young people find it non-threatening, and empowering and tend to disclose more information on the ipad than they would in a face to face interview, despite knowing they will be having one directly afterwards. This allows the doctor to focus on the issues the young person has chosen to disclose. These issues identified can then be addressed at an early stage, before ‘things’ get out of hand.

Garth was recently pleased to report that the project has been better and more successful than they were anticipating. They thought that things would start off slowly and gradually improve, however, they kind of hit the ground running, once word of mouth spread among the young people, and with the help of the Aboriginal Youth Health Worker who is very well connected with the community. They have really taken to the technology and in fact provide more information on the tablet than they would have in a one-to-one encounter with a doctor, despite knowing that the doctor will be seeing them as soon as they have completed the questions. This has been the experience of others doing research with similar tools. This has facilitated providing needed services for adolescents who not uncommonly avoid health services. Garth and the team have undertaken an official evaluation which was very positive.

Approximately 100 adolescents have participated in the psychosocial assessment using the iPad technology over the past year. That represents about 35% of the Aboriginal adolescent population of Broken Hill, which is very good considering that adolescents generally don’t access health services very much except for acute illness.

Many others around the country have become interested in doing the same in their health services, based on the success of the Maari Ma program.